When looking for alternatives to the dominating groupware suites Microsoft Outlook/Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes/Domino, one comes across multiple Web-based groupware solutions such as Zimbra. Since groupware is first and foremost about group collaboration—including messaging, calendar sharing and appointment scheduling, and managing of contact information—it seems like a good idea to implement it as a Web application, removing some of the hassles and inefficiencies of conventional client/server applications and allowing access to the software from a broad range of devices, including mobile phones or tablets.
There is, however, one significant drawback to Web-based groupware: It requires the user to have Web access in order to use the software. While offices in most parts of the world today have fast Internet connectivity, there are—even without thinking of less developed parts of the world—situations in which online connectivity is not given. A few examples follow.
Many manufacturing or service companies have sales personnel that visit customers in order to present their companies’ products. Even though their laptops might be equipped with 3G connectivity, their coverage is still not satisfactory even in developed countries, and large amounts of steel-reinforced concrete, as is used in most large buildings, might kill the signal altogether. A similar argument holds for external personnel and consultants that work at a client company’s site: very often, they have no or severely limited access over the client company’s network, and 3G connectivity might be patchy as well.
Another situation in which connectivity is non-present, but people tend to be working is all work-related travel. While getting Internet connectivity on a train might already be difficult, on most airplanes it is still downright impossible. While first airlines are introducing Internet connectivity for intercontinental flights, short-haul flights still remain an Internet-free area.
What is common to all of these situations is that people will want to use groupware: personnel at a customer site will want to access and update contact information as well as have access to their calendars to schedule new appointments, and people travelling will want to plan their days as well as read emails or write them for later sending. As a result, groupware will be useful in these situations only if it allows offline access with later synchronization of changes to a central server—just like the basic mode of operation for Outlook and Lotus Notes provides. Web-based solutions are of little help under these circumstances, since they generally do not allow offline operation.
Given that groupware is only really useful if all employees of a company can use it, in essence any company that has some employees regularly in situations like the ones described above, will want to stick to a groupware suite with the possibility of offline operation. Particularly for larger companies, that is most likely the case, since they will have multiple sites in different cities or even countries, that some staff regularly have to travel between. In turn, wide acceptance of Web-based groupware suites is not likely to happen before these “dead spots” in online connectivity will have been eradicated.
Tags: Groupware, Online, Web Applications